CARPART06 CAMP PERSONAL EVALUATION
Francesco Ascari, Italy
Bologna – Italy, 13th of August 2006
Firstly, I want to thank Kaja (East&West) NGO to have given me the opportunity to participate at this “big emotions” camp. Too much times I’ve used to thank someone just in a formal way, but I’m sure that, in this case, my words are deeply true. Without Bernard, Irina and his “european” help I shouldn’t be able to understand so many things about culture, people and the link between this two huge things. I’ve been really lucky to spend more than a month in Ukraine, especially in Lwiw, a wonderfull city, full of mixed artistic and philosophical flows.
Of course, Lwiw, my second home now, (maybe third, because I use to live in Barcelona!) has been really important for me. The time spent there has been amazing: meeting new ukranian friends, walking street to street, searching brend new point of view between different cultures. These activities made me grow up inside and give me the possibility to understand a little bit more about east europe countries.
I will not write about my personal relationship with this people (for me now they are like brothers!) because I want to take this emotion inside to keep it clean; only a note about it: UNDERSTAND each other is a hard work, needs a lot of time and a lot of energies, always should be do from both the persons envolved and will never be an unusefull work. Natalie, Edas, Oleg, Mykola, Zoza, Vassyl and me just have tried to do it.
Lwiw, Lwow or Leopoli, as you prefer, is a “full-immersion” culture city. Polish, Austrian and Russian forces had the honor/guilty to control it; maybe bad, maybe good, I have no instruments now to sentence it. I just can see the positive consequences, that everyone could see walking on a street of this town: mix of art, mix of culture, mix of religion. Mixes that make the Lwiw inhabitants grow up really smart, open - mind and ready to change their point of view. Maybe, for this reason I feel so in a good mood living with them, exchanging opinions and making constructive discussions.
Sometimes easy explications have sense and work, sometimes not; this is my easy one: Lwiw is placed in the west part of Ukraine and receives “european humanistic influences” quite different from the russian sovietic influence. Too easy?
The CarpART06 Camp
So wonderfull experience. I have the chance to compare this camp with the last year camp in Minsk, just to find positive and negative aspects to improve our quality and get better every year.
2005_Belarus: one big size european common sculpture for everyone + few workshops + a lot of discomusic at night.
2006_Ukraine: one medium size european common sculpture + a lot of intelligent workshops (separatism, windgarden, hidden history, garbage sculpture, educational ws) + a lot of live performance music at the fireplace in the night (I was really involved on it!).
So my conclusion about this topic is that the relationship between quality and quantity of activities must be analyzed to find the best compromise. In our young artistic world, we are maybe too fast to think always about an only main topic; we always have to change project, change point of view (maybe twice a day!), we need free space to experiment our strange ideas. This is the meaning of my idea of “open workshop dimension” and the cause of our hi-production of results in the ukranian CarpART06 camp.
Art is not a factory mechanism.
Art is a free mechanism.
Needs space and time.
Needs big quantity of impulses.
So, this year I saw more results and more documentation about it, a lot of material to work on it;the same main problem is how to keep on produce after camp and how to keep on contact between different people from different countries. Unlucky, not everyone has the possibility to use internet, computer, and free time as they would like to do and to continue some workshop even after august. Should be a good idea to organize a meeting post-work, maybe in the beginning of september to recollect material, to plan next targets and to finish all works. In this way, every year’s ecperience should be more connected to the next year’s one. Pre-meeting (April), Pre-Visit (July), Camp (July-August) and Post-meeting (September). I guess September is a good month to do it because some of the European Union’s deadlines are in the first days of November..
Personally, I worked in the media center workshop, helping other participants to realize their videos or their multimedia projects. Exactly, to develop common ideas, to analyze them, case by case, and to find artistic and smart audiovisual solutions to create messages for the camp. Was really a positive work, to exchange opinion about messages, from one side, and to discuss how to make them concrete, to the other side.
Results:
With the media project we realized videos, national evening presentaions, A3 posters and a photo dvd.
CARPART06VIDEO dvd:
1. MORNING_Mykola+Francesco_Hidden History workshop: a broken images video about the evolution of dirty&industrial energies; which future we will see? Red Night goes down for a born new Morning with no dirty energies.
2. INTERNATIONAL STUDENT_Mira_Educational ws: a smart and funny video about troubles could happen during international meetings.